Branding is a tricky thing when all information ever created is available to everyone all the time. Customers can compare and contrast your competition like never before. And new competition enters the market like never before.

Growing a brand in such an environment is tough. To create as much an advantage as possible, ask yourself these questions:

Why will my customers never leave me?

What about my brand is impossible for others to replicate?

If you don't have specific and defensible answers, you have some work to do.

Here is the upshot: once you have customers that never ever leave, or once you have a product no one else can make -- market that! That is best story a marketer can ask for.

The explosion of data is completely changing marketing, as well it should be. Equally as interesting to me is the explosion of digital marketing opportunities. It was just a decade ago that a small fraction of people in the world were on the internet, now it is about half.

What makes digital so different is that we know who these people are with shocking accuracy.

I had previously assumed this is just the way it should be and always was. Silly me. It was only through working with old school marketers that I came to understand why they are in such awe, excitement (and confusion?) with all this data. The opportunities are now endless and the people profiles uncountable.

What works in marketing nowadays is not just identifying the right opportunities but also the right people, and then making systems to test and optimize your work.

A great agency can accelerate your business like nothing else. But hiring an agency must be done very carefully, because if you do it wrong you misaligned agency will become a gigantic time and money sink.

This is my checklist for hiring an agency.

What is their creative vision? Why do they do what they do -- are they chasing innovation and excellence, or dollars?

What is their culture of getting things done? This will have the biggest impact on your day to day. If you have a good RFP then you will probably get many proposals that look roughly the same in terms of deliverables and timeline. So the stuff that happens in between is super important. How and when do they plan on communicating with you, the client? How many people on their end will you be working with, and how frequently? What processes, tools, and methods do they use?

Where are they located? If they are more than 45 minutes away by car, then they are remote. Working with a local agency has huge benefits because of the face to face time, but working with a remote agency can have plenty of benefits as well. If you are in San Francisco like me, you have an extraordinary amount of local talent to choose from, but can also find great deals if you shop elsewhere.

How big are they? Big agencies have big costs. Small agencies often lack breadth and bandwidth. I really love agencies in the 10-40 person range. They are big enough to have a lot of history together, and perhaps a brand, but they also usually also have minimal HR costs, overhead, and bureaucracy.

Who is doing the work? Is it the junior people, the senior people, a blend, are they outsourcing any of it? Be very clear upfront with who is doing what.

What does their work look like? Not the "portfolio" on their website, ask them to see deliverables from recent and relevant project. (Hint: if they do not recent project that is relevant to yours, maybe they do not do what you want them to do).

Do they understand the work to be done? Take as much time as you need to define very specifically the scope and expectations of the projects. This starts with creating a thorough RFP. Any unknowns of ambiguity translates to longer timelines and higher costs.

Do they check out? Feel free to ask them for references.

For best results, think of an agency as your partner and treat them accordingly. There is a reason why it is called an agency relationship. Agencies do best when you enable them for success and provide them with feedback and resources. Don't nickel and dime them on the deal. If they feel like they are getting shafted you project will not be a success. Win/win is the only outcome you should optimize for.

Marketing technologies have proliferated. This is a good thing. My entire career has been on the forefront of marketing innovation, and I'm happy that my current company TINT is recognized as an industry leader.

With all these new technologies come the communities of people that use them. Enter the Marketer Evangelist. The Marketer Evangelist is a combination of content marketer, community manager, business developer, and priest. They are the face of your company and are the person who other marketers wish they could be.

Something that I started thinking about last year, it has held up every time I test it. Easy to remember and has been very useful for me.

1) Do things that pay dividends All else equal, always do things that pay dividends. Small steps seem insignificant, but over time they can add up to something great. Ask yourself, am I doing this for immediate gratification, or am I building something of value for the future?

2) Do things just becauseI'm gong to say this but you are not going to believe me: most of your days locked in routine. We think we have variety, but jobs and weekends and evenings have a cadence, and it's natural to fall into that cadence. Most of the variety we do seek is often structured as well. I love finding variety in small and seemingly inconsequential things. Serendipity is a beautiful thing.

The most important decision when making a product is to decide for whom you are making that product. The implication here is that companies can choose their customers just as much as customers can choose companies (I'm not the first one to say this).

I have an observation that goes one step further. The most successful companies make products that appear to not need marketing at all, because the customer and message is hard baked into their identity.

This seems to be the successful strategy: make products for extremophiles(1) at the creation of your company and then continue to nurture that base as you grow. Extremophiles are sub groups of people that have a deep dedication to something obscure, identify with each other, and are loud. So they take notice when you make something specifically for them.

But that alone does not guarantee your success. Your product has to actually be great and help them become better at the things they already care about. If you can win them over, they might become radical evangelists.

Tesla wanted to build an efficient electric car for every family. But instead of attacking directly the complacent and boring family sedan market, they built the fastest electric car in the world and charged six figures. They knew that anyone trying to go from 0-60 in 3.7 seconds and also willing to pay top dollar would be an extremophile indeed. In fact Elon told everyone about his plan in 2006.

Facebook had the vision of connecting everyone in the world. Instead of asking everyone to put all their information online, they targeted college students. College students are an extremophile in many respects, but they have an especially high tolerance for being public with their life, and take more (taboo?) photos than anyone else with their newfangled smart phones. At least this was the case in 2005.

GoPro set out to make the smallest high definition video camera possible. Instead of selling to photography directors in Hollywood, where the quality standards are paramount, they went direct to extreme sports enthusiasts. Extreme sports, extremophile, you get the idea.

By making products for extremophiles, you might be able to convert them into radical evangelists.

P.S. More than a couple authors I respect have referenced Kevin Kelly's 1,000 True Fans in their writing before, and this was initially got me thinking about this concept. Perhaps 1,000 is good, but 1,000 extremophiles is better.

(1)I initially thought I made this word up, perhaps in an espresso induced sublimation. It turns out that an extremophile is "an organism that thrives in physically or geochemically extreme conditions that are detrimental to most life on Earth." So, I probably read about it some science news website somewhere and then transferred it accordingly. A fitting definition indeed.

I've spent most of my professional life on Twitter. I've made it work for my own brand and, as a marketer, work for the business of the companies I have represented. What I'm trying to say is -- I can't imagine work and business and life without Twitter.

But following in particular is out of control. The days of "I follow you and you follow me back" are long dead, I hope. (How to get followers is the topic for another post). I don't get how a person can honestly follow thousands -- or tens of thousands -- of people and still find value in using Twitter. My Twitter usage varies, but it is undeniably the #1 place I get my information and news. It shapes my worldview.

So I have a rule for myself: follow no more than 100 people. Of course this is a rule of thumb, at the current moment I am higher, but this means I require myself to regularly audit and prune the people and information I allow into my life. And this is advice I give to anyone else looking to get value from Twitter. I came up with the 100 numbers after years of trial and error with different limits, but I'm not surprised is it so close to Dunbar's number.

In exactly one month I will turn 28 years old. There is nothing significant for me about being 28 or the number itself. But it occurred to me that this marks 10 years of (more or less) maturity.

I moved out and away for college when I was 18, very typical. Not surprisingly I flourished alot in that year by picking up many new hobbies and interests. This was around the time I got really interested in marketing, business, math, working out etc. And now I have been working on these skills for 10 years. When I realized this recently it really struck me. 10 years is a long time to dedicate to something, and almost without realizing it I have dedicated 10 years to many somethings.

And this is the secondary motivation behind my one month writing challenge. With 10 years experience I probably have many good insights to share and it would make sense to share them. I think this writing challenge will also serve as a map for what is going in my head right now, so it will be cool to look back at it in 10 years time. Perhaps I can read it in 20 or 30 years if Elon manages to save the human race from destroying itself by then.

19.2 hours per week adds up to 1,000 hours per year. And now that it has been 10 years that means I have hit my 10,000 hours in a thing or two. That's pretty cool.

No one ever told me writing would be so important. Growing up, writing seemed to be the necessary by product of work -- a vessel to carry you to your destination. This was my lens that continued to influence the way I saw writing even past college. People who did care intensely about writing as a practice itself were the odd and "creative" ones. I didn't know they were on to something.

But writing is a fundamental element of communication. It has power. And in my line of work it is probably the most imporant skill you can have. That is how I eventually came into writing -- by force and to catch up. I realized that even though I was one of the "smart" kids my writing skills were weak. Now that I have been writing for years, I know that I will be writing for many years to come.

So it only makes sense that I should do whatever I can to become a better writer. In particular, I want to reevaluate the context in which I write. I usually write to produce a product, usually in the context of marketing. But it is my observation that many great writers I look up to write in order to think, and this is very different. It is safe to spend days producing and editing the most polished piece of content, but it is hard and risky to express yourself succinctly and press publish quickly.

This is my challenge: write and publish one piece to this blog every day for one month. This starts now with what you are reading. Many props to my colleague Brett for pioneering the Monthly Self Improvement program at TINT, which is the catalyst behind this challenge.

The rules

I must write every day. If I happen to not have internet access I am allowed to publish on the following day. But I must produce a piece every day.

The posts can be short. Or long. Length does not indicate quality.

No longer than 30 minutes on each post, including publishing, start to finish. Time does not correlate to quality.

I can be imperfect. This is the hardest rule, but it is the most important. I need to be okay with writing and publishing something that is not polished or could be better.

I don't have to be right. I can be wrong.

I have the permission to write about anything. (This might get interesting.)

(An excerpt from my college thesis... fyi time is relative. Pretty neat.)

The new marketing mix: Message, Media, Math

Marketing in the classroom does not translate well to the real world because it is fundamentally not a predicative science, despite how much it wants to be. Physics is a predictive science because force equals mass x acceleration always. Biology is a predicative science because plants take in our carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen always. Marketing is dependent upon people doing things -- but people are random and irrational beings -- and as such you cannot predict how humans will act, even though economics insists otherwise. The result is that the old school marketing mix (aka the "4Ps") is not totally relevant in the digital economy.

My prescriptive and more realistic model is 1) Message 2) Media and 3) Math. The message is what you say, the media is where you say it, and the math is how you measure it. I talked about the Message and the Media in a recent post on content marketing technologies, so now I want to talk about the Math. Math is a general term used for the quantitative methods to measure and optimize marketing. Marketing unmeasured is useless, because without performance marketing is an unjustifiable expenditure. The quantitative methods you use for such measurement could be very complicated or quite simple -- the point is you must measure your work or risk being fired.

Data != Insights

Generally speaking I advise that all companies are reliant upon the growth of 3-5 key performance indicators at most. Pump those numbers up and your business will grow, everything else is supplementary. This puts an interesting perspective on your business intelligence strategy -- you have to figure out how to measure the right things only, because more data is not necessarily better data. In fact, data is not useful just because it is "data". The goal of business intelligence is to find insight, because insight tells you things you can do to make your business better. If you cannot derive insight from your data you are doing it wrong.

New Technologies

Early web analytics software evolved to serve the needs or early web businesses. Technology was quite limited back then, and so the kinds of things you could do and measure on a website were also quite limited. Everything has changed because now we have we have social, mobile, and SAAS (and whatever is next). The amount of data you can measure, and it's different types, has grown exponentially. I have listed below some companies that do business intelligence for technology companies trying to make sense of this new and bigger data. This is definitely not and exhaustive list, so do your own research before you buy.

There used to be a small oligopoly of business intelligence companies, but the proliferation of new channels and platforms has spawned a new market of BI technologies to serve it. Indeed you can collect more data and measure it in more ways now, but that is not the point. Remember, data != insights, so more data != more insights. An overbuilt data system is your enemy. Your goal should be to determine the few KPIs that are most important to your business and then to implement the tools that will help you measure and optimize them best.